It's part of the Great American Affordability Crisis. Coupled
with the fallout from the recession and a high cost of living,
student-loan debt has made it difficult for millennials to save
and has forced them to delay milestones like getting married,
buying a house, and having kids.

1. The national total student debt is now over $1.5 trillion.

2. College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s.

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From the late 1980s to 2018, the cost of an undergraduate degree
increased by 213% at public schools and 129% at private schools,
adjusting for inflation, Student Loan Hero reported,
citing stats from The College Board.

During that time, annual tuition rose to $9,970 from $3,190 for
public schools and to $34,740 from $15,160 for private schools.

To pay it off, they're turning to their Social Security benefits,
CBS News reported.

4. As of May 2018, 101 people in the US owe at least $1 million each in student loans, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing the Education Department.

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Costs for professional degrees are rising too. In 2013, only 14
people in the US owed $1 million or more each on their federal
student loans, The Wall Street Journal
reported, citing the Education Department. By 2018, that had
increased to 101 people.

Interest rates for graduate students increased by more than 6
percentage points from 2004 to 2012, according to The Journal.

Consider Mike Meru, an orthodontist who owed $1,060,945 in
student loans as of May 2018 and is expected to face a $2 million
loan balance in the next two decades, The Journal said.

A recent
Wall Street Journal report found that graduates of
historically black colleges had 32% more debt than students at
other colleges and that most had not paid off any debt in their
first few years out of school.

Carrying student loans keeps the
wealth gap between black and white families startlingly wide:
A Levy Economics Institute study last year found that with
student debt, young white families had 12 times as much wealth as
black ones; eliminating that debt lessened that to just five
times as much wealth.

6. As many as 40% of borrowers could default on their student loans by 2023.

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The
2018 Brookings Institution report followed students who were
paying loans up to 20 years after graduation and found that the
rate at which people defaulted on their loans continued to rise
12 to 20 years after graduation.

By analyzing the rate of default 20 years after graduation for
those who started college in 1995 and 2003, the report predicted
that nearly 40% of borrowers could default on their loans by
2023.

7. Of people who use a bankruptcy-assistance service to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, 32% carry student-loan debt.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Of the people in that group, student-loan debt made up 49% of
their total debt on average, a new LendEDU study of users of the
service, called Upsolve, found.

Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection is used to liquidate the assets
of people with limited incomes who can't pay back all or a
portion of their debt. The goal is to discharge the debt.

8. Some US workers would even ditch vacation time for help paying their loans.

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Even after graduating and landing a job, workers say they're
still desperate for help paying off student loans.

Of people with student loans, 63% said they would give up paid
time off in exchange for help paying off student loan debt,
according to a
new survey by job marketplace ZipRecruiter provided to
Business Insider.

Workers said they would forgo an average of two months of
vacation time in exchange for debt relief, though a staggering
one-fourth of Americans would give up as much as five months PTO.

9. Student-loan debt is the reason 13% of Americans in a survey conducted last year said they decided not to have kids.

Student-loan borrowers are also delaying or refraining from
buying a house, because they can't afford it.

"I don't feel comfortable taking a loan on a house while having
student loans," Boone Porcher, a supply-chain consultant who owes
$32,645 after five years at a public university,
previously told Business Insider.

Another graduate, a water-resources engineer who graduated from a
public university with roughly $25,000 in debt, told Business Insider, "I feel
like buying a house is a total pipe dream at this point in my
life, but I'm tightening my belt as much as possible to save for
a down payment right now."

10. Some have drawn parallels between the student-debt crisis and the subprime-mortgage disaster.

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The rate at which student-loan borrowers can't pay their debt
looks a lot like the rate at which people could not pay their
mortgages during the
2008 financial crisis.

As of 2017, default and 90-day delinquency rates for student
loans hovered at 11%, according to a report by Citi Global Perspectives
& Solutions. Delinquency rates during the mortgage crisis
peaked at 11.5% in 2010.

The report found that those with lower debt were actually more
likely to default, since those with more debt tend to have
degrees that lead to higher-paying jobs. Those with less initial
debt, meanwhile, likely dropped out without a degree to get a
better-paying job.

11. Nearly 50% of millennials who have or had student-loan debt think college wasn't worthwhile.

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In a recent
INSIDER and
Morning Consult survey, when asked whether it was worth
attending college based on their current financial situation and
their student loans, about 21% of respondents said "definitely
not" and about 23% said "probably no."

Unsurprisingly, respondents who are still paying off their
student-loan debt felt worse
about having gone to college than millennials who had already
paid off their debt.